God's Shadow

God's Shadow PDF Author: Alan Mikhail
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571331920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.

God's Shadow

God's Shadow PDF Author: Alan Mikhail
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571331920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.

God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World PDF Author: Alan Mikhail
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
An “arresting” (New York Times Book Review) revisionist history demonstrating how Islam and the Ottoman Empire made our modern world. The history of the Ottoman Empire—once the most powerful state on earth, ruling over more territory and people than any other world power—has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and suppressed in the West. With this “original and wide-ranging” (Wall Street Journal) global history, Alan Mikhail vitally recasts the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520). Drawing on previously unexamined sources, and upending prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories, Mikhail’s game-changing account radically transforms our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the annals of the modern world.

Empress of the East

Empress of the East PDF Author: Leslie Peirce
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The "fascinating . . . lively" story of the Russian slave girl Roxelana, who rose from concubine to become the only queen of the Ottoman empire (New York Times). In Empress of the East, historian Leslie Peirce tells the remarkable story of a Christian slave girl, Roxelana, who was abducted by slave traders from her Ruthenian homeland and brought to the harem of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in Istanbul. Suleyman became besotted with her and foreswore all other concubines. Then, in an unprecedented step, he freed her and married her. The bold and canny Roxelana soon became a shrewd diplomat and philanthropist, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women, from Isabella of Hungary to Catherine de Medici, increasingly held the reins of power. Until now Roxelana has been seen as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but in Empress of the East, Peirce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca PDF Author: Michael Christopher Low
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature PDF Author: Franco Moretti
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168085X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Who – and what – are the Bourgeois? “The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?” Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.

Fall of the Sultanate

Fall of the Sultanate PDF Author: Ryan Gingeras
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199676070
Category : Osmanisches Reich
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was by no means a singular event. After six hundred years of ruling over the peoples of North Africa, the Balkans and Middle East, the death throes of sultanate encompassed a series of wars, insurrections, and revolutions spanning the early twentieth century.This volume encompasses a full accounting of the political, economic, social, and international forces that brought about the passing of the Ottoman state. In surveying the many tragedies that transpired in the years between 1908 and 1922, Fall of the Sultanate explores the causes that eventuallyled so many to view the legacy of the Ottomans with loathing and resentment.The volume provides a retelling of this critical history as seen through the eyes of those who lived through the Ottoman collapse. Drawing upon a large gamut of sources in multiple languages, Ryan Gingeras strikes a critical balance in presenting and interpreting the most impactful experiences thatshaped the lives of the empire's last generation. The story presented here takes into account the perspectives of the empire's diverse population as well as the leaders who piloted the state to its end. In surveying the personal, communal and national struggles that defined Italy's invasion ofLibya, the Balkan War, the Great War, and the Turkish War of Independence, Fall of the Sultanate presents readers with a fresh and comprehensive exposition of how and why Ottoman imperial rule ended in bloodshed and disillusionment.

Suleiman the Magnificent

Suleiman the Magnificent PDF Author: Andre Clot
Publisher: Saqi
ISBN: 0863568033
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Suleiman the Magnificent, most glorious of the Ottoman sultans, kept Europe atremble for nearly half a century. In a few years he led his army as far as the gates of Vienna, made himself master of the Mediterranean and established his court in Baghdad. Faced with this redoubtable champion, who regarded it as his duty to extend the boundaries of Islam farther and farther, the Christian world struggled to unite against him. 'The Shadow of God on Earth', but also an expert politician and all-powerful despot, Suleiman ruled the state firmly with the help of his viziers. He extended the borders of the empire beyond what any of the Ottoman sultans had achieved, yet it is primarily as a lawgiver that he is remembered in Turkish history. His empire held dominion over three continents populated by more than thirty million inhabitants, among whom nearly all of the races and religions of mankind were represented. Prospering under a well-directed, authoritarian economy, Suleiman's reign marked the apogee of Ottoman power. City and country alike experienced unprecedented economic and demographic growth. Istanbul was the largest city in the world, enjoying a remarkable renaissance of arts and letters; a mighty capital, it was the seat of the Seraglio and dark intrigue.

The Far Land

The Far Land PDF Author: Brandon Presser
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541758595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
For fans of The Wager and Mutiny on the Bounty comes a thrilling true tale of power, obsession, and betrayal at the edge of the world. In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Pitcairn Island was the perfect hideaway from British authorities, but after nearly two decades of isolation its secret society had devolved into a tribalistic hellscape; a real-life Lord of the Flies, rife with depravity and deception. Seven generations later, the island’s diabolical past still looms over its 48 residents; descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. Only a rusty cargo ship connects Pitcairn with the rest of the world, just four times a year. In 2018, Brandon Presser rode the freighter to live among its present-day families; two clans bound by circumstance and secrets. While on the island, he pieced together Pitcairn’s full story: an operatic saga that holds all who have visited in its mortal clutch—even the author. Told through vivid historical and personal narrative, The Far Land goes beyond the infamous Mutiny on the Bounty, offering an unprecedented glimpse at life on the fringes of civilization, and how, perhaps, it’s not so different from our own.

Süleymanname

Süleymanname PDF Author: Esin Atıl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : tr
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The Suleymanname is an imperial illuminated manuscript, housed in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul. It was commissioned by the Sultan Suleyman I, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith. This facsimile edition is printed in four colours plus gold, and in tritone.

The Greek Revolution

The Greek Revolution PDF Author: Mark Mazower
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans. Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.